Full-Text Articles in Law

Faculty Scholarship

This Article reports on a mechanism for removing children in conflict with their parents: statutory emancipation, the process by which minors attain legal adulthood before reaching the age of majority. Statutorily emancipated minors can sign binding contracts, own property, keep their earnings, and disobey their parents. Although under eighteen, they are considered as being over the age of majority in most of their dealings with parents and third parties. Thus, while emancipated minors can sign contracts and stay out late, their adult status also means that their parents are no longer responsible for the minors' support. To understand why minors ...

M Is For The Many Things, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

My basic argument is this: Motherhood is a central but confusing icon within our social structure. It is at once domination and dominated, much as mothers are both revered and regulated. The reverence and regulation are not so much in conflict as in league. The rules remind women of how to behave in order to stay revered. This reverence is something more than a fan club for mothers. It matters in such practical and concrete ways as keeping one's children, having credibility in court, getting promoted at work, and so on.

The Reasonable Woman And The Ordinary Man, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

... Objections to the reasonable woman standard [for sexual harassment] combine doctrinal concerns with practical ones. The doctrinal question is something like, Whatever happened to gender neutrality? How are men supposed to know what conduct strikes their victims as intimidating, hostile, or offensive? After all, women are so sensitive – take Anita Hill. Why, as men often ask, can't women be more reasonable? ...

The answer is that at least in determining what behavior is sexually harassing, women are not like men. As many feminists have explained, women commonly experience as fearful what men find fun. ...